


one beaded blue silk Fortuny Delphos, mint condition, never worn

by hollimichele



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M, Multi, Other, this is an EVEN MORE HIPSTERS AU, this is not a hipster AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:32:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/pseuds/hollimichele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a tucked-away corner of Camden Town, in London, there’s a unassuming little shopfront with a bright blue door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one beaded blue silk Fortuny Delphos, mint condition, never worn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afterism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/gifts).



> So, uh, it is going to be SCREAMINGLY obvious who wrote this for anyone who knows me. I am at peace with that. Please enjoy this vintage shop AU.

In a tucked-away corner of Camden Town, in London, there’s an unassuming little shop front with a bright blue door. It has not suffered renovations, or plate glass, and the round, blurry panes of the leaded windows must be peered through to see the mannequins dressed in bright and lovely clothes. A sign hangs over the door, swinging a little when the wind gusts, that simply reads “Bigger on the Inside.”

Push the door open, and you’ll see a red-headed girl sitting behind a desk, cutting yellowed sheet music into circles. She’ll look up as the bell jingles, offer a bright smile and her help finding anything that’s needed.

The shop seems to be made up of endless poky rooms, each filled with clothes and decorated in a different style. One, hung with fairy lights, holds Titanic-era gowns, all net and beading; another, stark black and white, is packed with colorful Mod scooter dresses and narrow-trousered suits. There’s a flight of stairs, and another, and more rooms unfold, each dedicated to a different era or style.

At the very farthest reaches of the shop, you’ll find a little room filled with tweedy jackets and cricket jumpers and long woollen scarves. Another bright blue door is painted with a polite sign: THIS DOOR IS FOR THE USE OF OUR EMPLOYEES. PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. When you reach the sign you must reverse your steps and, laden with your discoveries, make your way past the fitting rooms and the party dresses and the wall hung entirely with hats, back to the red-headed shop-girl, who by now has assembled the paper circles into a complex geodesic globe. When you reach her, she’ll wipe the glue from her fingers and ring you up, cutting the price tags from each item and taping them to a sheet of paper in a ring binder, and, should you pay in cash, making change from a massive old chrome cash register.

She’ll wave you out before going back to gluing her circles together. Should you return to the shop, a week later, perhaps, the window might be hung with a forest of sheet-music globes, each softly lit from within.

The shop will be different every time you see it. The people inside, though, stay the same. 

*****

“Seventies party,” Arthur announced, hanging up the phone and settling back into his seat behind the desk, next to Karen. “Another one. If I have to buy one more bloody awful polyester shirt, I’m going to go blind. I really am.”

“Oh, hush,” Karen told him. “You’ll do no such thing. I don’t complain about the girls who come in asking for the nineteen-twenties, and throw a fit when I explain the clothes are too fragile to wear out and too small to fit them besides.”

“Yes, you do,” Arthur said. “You were doing it yesterday. You do it once a week, minimum.”

“Well, fine,” Karen said, scowling at him. “So what if I do? They’re ninety-year-old clothes, made of silk, covered in beads, and your best mate’s hen party is-- I’m sorry-- not an appropriate place to wear them!”

“No, that’s fair,” Arthur conceded. “I can’t argue with that. Now, are you coming to this house with me tomorrow? They’ve got your sort of stuff.”

“Oh, really? What’s my sort of stuff, then?” Karen asked. “Have I got a sort of stuff?”

“You know. Mod,” Arthur said. “Little poly-knit minidresses and things. And of course you’ve got a sort of stuff, everyone does.”

“I will concede that _you’ve_ got a sort of stuff,” Karen said, “but only because your sort of stuff is obviously horrible jumpers.”

Arthur got very offended at this, which was odd, because his horrible jumpers were a fact of life at the shop, and were, mysteriously, one of their biggest sellers.

Karen finished writing up her latest price tag, and attached it to a dress with a satisfying _ker-chunk_ of the pricing gun. Arthur was pulling clothes from an overstuffed plastic bag, putting them on hangers, and hanging them on the rack next to the steamer. There were minimal horrible jumpers today, Karen noted: he seemed to have had better luck with frilly tuxedo shirts and velvet frock coats. And, ooh-- “Is that a cape?”

“Yes, it’s a cape,” Arthur said. “No, you can’t have it. We’ve cut you off, remember? Matt says you’re not allowed any more capes until you start wearing the ones you have.”

Karen pouted, just a bit. “Matt’s not the boss of me.”

“He is, actually,” Arthur said cheerfully. “He’s the boss of us both. He signs our payslips, and owns the building, and he says if I let you have another cape he’s going to conduct a secret midnight raid on your flat and confiscate all your capes for your own good and theirs.”

Karen decided that the best course of action was to haughtily flick her hair over her shoulder and change the subject. “Whatever. What’s this house, then?”

“You remember-- Matt set it up. The Lambert estate?”

“Ah! Right. Yeah, I’ll come along. Might be fun.”

It _was_ fun, as it turned out-- a packed house, all the closets stuffed with lovely things. Karen found a cache of hatboxes in the attic, all tied neatly shut with the hats still inside, and snapped up one and all after modeling most of them for Arthur. He took the men’s stuff. There were loads of heavy plaid wool work shirts, even some Pendletons; Arthur got as excited about those as Karen did about the handful of Horrockses day dresses, though he was a bit more understated about it.

“Mine, mine, mine, all mine!” Karen singsonged, jumping up and down with the dresses clutched to her chest.

“They’re not your size,” Arthur pointed out. “Too big.”

“Then I’m going to dress someone up in them, and she’s going to look _fabulous_ ,” Karen said.

That was the nice thing about her job, really: she got to go treasure-hunting whenever she liked, and then play dress-up with life-sized dolls. Just about every day was an adventure.

She thought Arthur liked it for similar reasons. He was as good a buyer as she was; though he didn’t like working with the customers as much, he made up for it by being brilliant at coming up with the shop’s layouts and displays.

They arrived back at the shop in time to open it for the day, laden with bags and hatboxes, a pair of wingtips looped around Arthur’s wrist by the laces. Matt was already there, perched on a stool behind the desk with his long legs drawn up under it. “Morning, you two,” he called out to them, not looking up from his laptop. Karen peeked at the screen long enough to see that it was full of mysterious spreadsheets, which she ignored on general principle. “Was the house good?”

“It was lovely,” Karen answered. “And we stayed under budget.”

“There’s a first,” Matt said, looking up and smiling at them both, and Karen felt her heart clench a little in her chest. She shoved it back, the thing she wasn’t thinking about, and mustered up a smile and an offer to model some more hats.

It was a busy day: lots of shoppers, lots of tourists poking into every corner of the shop, a girl with candyfloss-colored Jem and the Holograms hair coming in with a bag of things to sell.

“Why did you buy these?” Arthur asked Matt, later, holding up a pair of six-inch black PVC platforms the same way he might have held up a dead rat. Karen wrinkled her nose at them.

“Someone might like them,” Matt said, and infuriatingly they were gone by the end of the day.

Over lunch (mutter paneer and samosas from the vegetarian Indian place down the street), Karen asked Matt how he’d found out about the house. “I have my sources,” he replied, trying to sound mysterious around a huge mouthful of garlic naan, and failing.

“You never say how you find this stuff,” Arthur said, gesturing with his plastic fork. “I mean, last week you just turned up with three suitcases full of Edwardian tea dresses. And you send us all over London, and everyone we buy from seems to have known you for ages, and they’ve all got piles of stuff they want to sell us for next to nothing. I’d quite like to know how you do it.”

“A man’s got to have some secrets,” Matt said, shrugging. “I’m good at networking, that’s all. And people like the shop.”

That was true enough. Karen didn’t always work on the busiest days, but she saw enough of the shop’s books to know that they were making more money than a vintage shop had any right to. Yes, they had a lot of high-ticket items, but there were also a handful of five-pound trunks that they could hardly keep full. The shop was about as popular as it had ever been, so far as Karen could see-- and Karen had done her research.

From what she’d been able to work out, it had passed through nearly a dozen owners in its time. When it opened in the early sixties, it had sold new clothes, and had done more or less that, despite various retoolings and rebrandings, up til the end of the eighties. Then it had shut, and stayed shut, the merchandise untouched, for more than fifteen years, until it had been bought and reopened by Matt’s last-but-one predecessor. He’d revived it as a vintage shop, selling off the old merchandise and replacing it with more old merchandise when that went, before moving on to some new career. Matt had bought the place from the owner after that, and done as well by it as anyone who’d owned it.

Karen and Arthur had been with him from the start, the first people he’d hired. They were both fundamentally unsuited to real jobs, liked old things, and didn’t mind getting their hands dirty. They fit with each other, the three of them. They worked as well together as anyone she’d worked with-- better, even.

That was what Karen mulled over, during a thoughtful half-hour spent straightening the serried ranks of clip earrings in the jewellery case. Meanwhile, Matt and Arthur squabbled over whose turn it was to sweep the floors. “Chore rota exists for a reason, boys,” she called to them from her position cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a sea of diamanté.

That was how the days passed, in the normal course of things, at the shop. Karen tried on full-skirted dresses with too many petticoats underneath (and then Matt did too), and Arthur knotted skinny ties about his throat, and Matt swept in wearing t-shirts that were mostly holes and a near-infinite variety of scarves. When they weren't at the shop, they were digging through charity shops together, or eating elaborate meals cooked in Arthur's tiny kitchen together, or standing crammed in the front row of concerts at hole-in-the-wall clubs together. They loaded Matt's ancient, creaking van with folding racks and clothes pulled from the shop's cellar storage, and spent days at flea markets all over London.

It was everything Karen wanted-- or nearly.

Arthur caught her looking, one day, when Matt's back was turned. After Matt had left, off to meet a pensioner moving to a care home who'd never got rid of an item of clothing in her life, Arthur eyed her speculatively.

"You ought to go for it, you know," he told her.

She glanced over at him, startled. They were sorting through a pile of black-and white snapshots Matt had brought back from somewhere, reading out the spidery handwriting off the backs of photos to one another. “Go for what?”

“You know. Matt. You ought to,” he said.

She shook her head, vehement. She wasn’t all that surprised to have been caught looking; she’d seen him doing it, too.

“We can’t both have him,” she said.

Arthur tipped his head to one side, considering. There was quiet between them, no customers in the shop, just a little muffled street noise filtering in from outside.

“Why not?” he said at last.

Karen blinked. “I... honestly hadn’t considered that,” she said. “What would Matt think of it?”

“What do _you_ think of it?” he countered.

She had to think, a bit, before answering. “I wouldn’t want to choose, I don’t think,” she said at last. “Between you, I mean. I don’t think I could.”

Arthur smiled, looking relieved. “Me too,” he said. She thought he might move to kiss her, then, but he didn’t, just cocked his head the other way and asked, “So what do we do? And when do we do it?”

“I think we’ll know,” Karen said. “When the moment’s right.”

And the right moment did come, without a great deal of waiting. Karen spent a few days acutely aware of Arthur’s presence beside her in the shop, caught herself staring at his hands or his mouth, thinking thoughts she hadn’t been allowing herself to think before. She was carried off in one such daydream when Matt burst in, cradling a long cardboard box and looking triumphant.

“I am the king!” he crowed, twirling in the doorway, the box held aloft. “You should all be very impressed because I am amazing, and what’s in this box is even more amazing than me! So that’s pretty amazing, all round.”

Karen left off dressing the mannequins in the window. They’d come into a lot of nineteen-twenties fancy dress costumes, and she’d been carefully sliding a fragile silk purple-and-blue butterfly dress onto the smallest dress form when Matt opened the door.

“Well, what have you got, then?” she asked, eyeing the box speculatively. Arthur appeared in the doorway from the next room, a paper chain hung around his neck; he’d been redecorating.

Matt laid the box atop the jewellery counter, and reverently lifted the lid. He uncovered jewel-toned silk, pleated finely, and lifted it gently out; the beads along the seams clicked a little as he laid the dress out flat on the glass. It was the same deep, saturated blue as the shop’s front door.

“That’s never a Delphos,” Karen breathed, reaching out to touch it but stopping just short.

“You found a Fortuny?” Arthur asked, incredulous. “Seriously? Aren’t they all in museums?”

“This one’s not,” Matt said. “This one’s ours.”

Karen let out a little involuntary shriek of glee. She grabbed Matt’s arms, and he grabbed hers, and the two of them began jumping up and down together.

Arthur leaned in to look closer at the dress, his fingers ghosting over the fabric. “That’s gorgeous,” he breathed. “You’re gorgeous. Come here,” and he wrapped one hand around the back of Matt’s neck and pulled him in to kiss him.

Matt stilled, his hands tightening on Karen’s arms in surprise, but he didn’t let go, or break the kiss. When they came up for air, he blinked a little, glancing from Arthur to Karen and back. “Well,” he said, speechless for the first time since she’d known him. “Um.”

Karen decided to seize the opportunity, and leaned forward to kiss him herself. His mouth was soft under hers, and it only took him a moment to catch up and kiss her back. She smiled into his mouth, and drew back, laughing to see how wild-eyed he looked, standing there between her and Arthur, his mouth and his cheeks a little pinker than usual.

“I ought to look harder for Edwardian couture,” he said finally, still looking a bit stunned, “if that’s the reaction I’m going to get.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Karen said. “It’s not just the dress. Although the dress is brilliant,” she added, glancing back at the counter where it lay, glowing under the shop’s lights. “Completely brilliant.”

“Utterly brilliant,” Arthur chipped in. “But-- well, we talked about it, a little a while ago, and we’d like you. Both of us. If you’ll have us.”

It took Matt a moment to process it, but when the moment was done a slow smile grew upon his face, until he was beaming. “ _That’s_ brilliant,” he said at last. “You’re brilliant. As brilliant as that, at least,” he said, pointing at the dress, “and possibly more so. Come on, we’re closing for lunch.” And he flipped over the OPEN sign hanging on the door, and locked it.

“Lead the way,” said Arthur, and they followed him through the winding rooms and up the narrow stairs of the shop, to the blue door with PLEASE DO NOT ENTER painted on it in neat white letters.

*****

There’s a shop in a corner of Camden Town, and it doesn’t look like much from the outside. But if you’re looking for a sparkly Sixties jumpsuit, or a nylon jacket all covered in patches, or a schoolboy’s uniform, it’ll have what you need. Within its walls are held more things than you might expect, from looking at the front door.

It’s closed, just at the moment. But be patient. It’s worth the wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to thinkatory, finch, and Mme. Hardy for beta, and Trialia for a thorough Britpicking.


End file.
